New York Sky, Style Stolen By The Greedy

August 19, 1987|By JIMMY BRESLIN, Syndicated Columnist

NEW YORK -- Mayor Ed Koch has the brain of a 28-year-old and the blood vessels of a 62-year-old. That is the condition of Koch, who left the hospital a week and a half ago after a minor stroke. As there is no such thing as trivial, the hope is that he takes care of himself.

The future is its usual fog, but the past can be most comforting to Koch, on a medical basis.

This city never has had a mayor who didn`t walk out of City Hall on his own feet. We did have one mayor shot by a disgruntled former employee. Mayor William Gaynor was shot in 1910, but the shooting did not take Gaynor out of office. He ran the city more or less until 1913, when he died on the liner Baltic, which was en route to Liverpool.

THE OLIVER NORTH OF HIS TIME

Gaynor was succeeded by John Puroy Mitchell, who left City Hall while still vertical, then fell out of a plane flying upside down over New Mexico.

Of course there have been mayors who left City Hall ahead of schedule, the most famous being Jimmy Walker, who one day in 1930 sat in his office and was told Detective Paddy Flood wanted to see him. Walker had the detective brought in.

``Such as some guy from the governor`s office looking for the papers on the Rothstein case,`` Flood said. Arnold Rothstein was a gambler and loan shark who was closely connected to Walker and who was shot dead in 1928. They arrested somebody on the charge and the judge set the North American record for distance hurling when he threw the case out of court. ``I`m sure you`ll perform your duty,`` Walker said. Flood did. Apparently, he was the Oliver North of his time. For today, in all the old court records, there is no file on the Rothstein murder case.

In New York today, things are much different. There is not one center of larceny. Today, part of the city can be found under a builder`s arm, another part in the pocket of a Queens judge and another in the bank vault of a former city commissioner. Under Ed Koch, there are so many city officials who for some reason are so addicted to stealing that there seems to be no fear of retribution. Returning too quickly to a City Hall that is tense from larceny and the fear of someone else being exposed could be intolerable for anyone with a slight cold, much less Koch.

All you had to do the Saturday Koch spent in bed was look at the skyline of his city and compare it to what it was when he became mayor in 1977. Our sky and style have been stolen by men whose buildings represent one common theme, and that, of course, is greed.

Also while Koch was in bed we had the following: In City Hall, Terrence Moan, in charge of real estate, had to resign when it was discovered that he was in a real-estate deal that he shouldn`t have been in. And when he was to get out of it, he said, ``How can I do that? I would lose money.``

Koch`s former best friend, Bess Myerson, now was reported to be under still another investigation, this time for trying to fix a postage meter. She did this, it is claimed, in the office of her boyfriend, Andy Capasso. If she did this in her boyfriend`s office, one can only shudder when he thinks what she must have tried inside City Hall.

CABLE IN JUNEAU BUT NOT IN QUEENS

The new head of the city probation department was found to have put his tax payments in a halfway house.

Out in Queens, Michael Nussbaum came reeling out of court after being convicted of helping Donald Manes try to extort $250,000 from a cable-TV company. Nearly all of the city, except Manhattan, has no cable. It now seems obvious that cable TV has been serving as a vehicle with which public officials can steal. They have cable in Juneau, Alaska, and not in Queens.

And while Nussbaum staggered out of court, dusting himself off on Queens Boulevard after his arrest by federal authorities was attorney Melvin Lebetkin. His trouble comes from the Parking Violations Bureau, an agency that was supposed to be part of city government but actually served as another private weapon for politicians to use in extorting money.

All of which is one glance about the city on the day the mayor rested in bed. The hope is that he doesn`t believe, as the doctors tried to imply, that he is immortal and then rushes back to work. Because there is an awful lot of stress at City Hall.